


Orange Fleece Blues

by bomberqueen17



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Fluff, M/M, Snuggling, Winter, bronchitis, orange fleece
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-29
Updated: 2013-12-29
Packaged: 2018-01-06 13:35:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1107471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>That first winter, cut off from Earth, supplies run short and everybody gets colds. John does his job, but it doesn't matter how much of a badass you are, eventually if you're sick and tired and cold enough you're gonna need some help from a friend.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Orange Fleece Blues

**Author's Note:**

  * For [popkin16](https://archiveofourown.org/users/popkin16/gifts).



They had been cut off from Earth for months now. And it was winter, and cold, bone-achingly cold. Atlantis’s environmental systems proved unable to keep up with the chill, and the average temperature in the living areas fell to around 12 C (or, as John enjoyed insisting, “like fifty-two degrees”, just to wind Rodney up). The engineers worked hard and managed to scramble some repairs that got the mess hall up to sixty, and a few of the common areas including the control room, but most of the personnel quarters stubbornly stayed cold. 

All the reconnaissance teams had to run a few emergency trading missions to try to find somebody who’d trade them good blankets and better cold-weather food. AR-2 managed to snag an electric sewing machine somewhere, and traded quite a bit of copper wire for it, but it was worth it to be able to speed up their production of garments and things from the raw fabric it was much easier to get ahold of than finished goods. The engineers managed to copy it in relatively short order, and traded back the knowledge of the improvements they made on the design for a whole bunch of spools of thread pre-wound onto the bobbins that fit it.

It didn’t mean they had plenty of clothing, though. Everything old had to be lovingly mended, still. And then AR-4 brought back a really, really nasty chest cold that took almost everyone down. Most everyone wound up with a hacking cough for a week or two, but a few people had it develop into bronchitis, and some of the unlucky ones got pneumonia out of it. 

Nobody died, and nobody was permanently disabled, but everybody was pretty miserable for a while. 

John normally made out all right with respiratory infections, but he wound up with pretty bad bronchitis. Teyla got pneumonia, and John spent a couple of nights lying next to her listening to her harsh breathing as he faded in and out of sleep, pretty ill himself. Beckett was always cautious in treating her, never quite knowing whether she’d react to antibiotics properly or not. By now he had a decent baseline, but he still preferred to be conservative and err on the side of not using Earth medicines. 

But she pulled through, and her fever broke, and her cough became truly horrible-sounding but at least stronger. 

John still sat by her bedside a lot. He was in the gross-but-productive coughing stage himself, and the infirmary was one of the few places they could manage to heat to nearly seventy degrees ( _twenty!_ Rodney would squawk). To pass the time, he worked on the mending, and she mostly slept, but sometimes spoke quietly to him of all kinds of things. 

He didn’t sleep in the infirmary anymore, though. He was getting better, and so could withstand the cold of his own quarters. So after she fell asleep, he packed his mending back into his satchel and took it back to his quarters. He’d just shucked his pants to change into pyjamas when his radio bleated from the side table. 

They needed him in the control room for something. Great. He put his pants back on, hopped into his boots, and made the mistake of jogging down the hallway. He had to lean on the wall by the transporter for a moment to get his breath back after the coughing fit, but he got himself together and managed to stroll into the control room in a reasonably composed fashion. 

AR-sort-of-5 was stuck offworld in some sort of negotiation gone wrong, and needed backup. John went through the mission rosters a little frantically, trying to figure out who was sick and who was well enough to go offworld. AR-5 was already half made up of subs, and was their strongest team currently. They weren’t supposed to be going anywhere they could get in trouble, he groused to himself, but he supposed it was never obvious when it was going to become a problem. He had a few security teams that were reasonably well, of course; he’d been carefully keeping track of sick and well personnel in case of incursion or other emergency. But most of them were decidedly not diplomatic personnel; they were almost all the backup muscle, at this point.

He picked a couple of the least trigger-happy backup muscle guys, plus Sgt. Grummer from AR-3 (Ford’s fever hadn’t broken yet; he said he was fine but John knew better than to believe a 25-year-old on that kind of thing), AR-2’s anthropologist (Sandingham, a reasonable diplomat), and… himself. He was the most recovered of the team leaders, which was kind of scary, but true; Bates was pretty much delirious, Lt. Eisenstadt from AR-3 had been fine when John had last reviewed the rosters but today was on the verge of pneumonia, AR-4’s leader was offworld with the stranded team, AR-5’s Lt. Walters had a fever, AR-6’s Sgt. Yates had been killed last month… John it was. 

It felt odd to go offworld without Rodney, but Rodney was ass-deep in the environmental controls and coughing like a mad thing. He was too busy to be severely hypochondriac, but John knew he was saving it up for later. So he adjusted his own tac vest and restrained himself from checking Dr. Sandingham’s equipment, and went through the wormhole, vaguely wishing they still had real Sudafed. 

The extraction wasn’t a total disaster, but it didn’t go smoothly either, and John wound up covered in mud, and blood that was mostly not his own, and twelve hours later was in the infirmary getting stitches. It was hard to stop coughing long enough for them to put them in— it was a shallow, long knife wound, all down the length of his left forearm, and it stung like a bitch. It said a lot about the state of the mission that John was mostly upset about having bled all over the newest shirt he owned, which he’d made himself by a lot of trial and error. It wasn’t quite black— it turned out that a good solid permanent black dye was really tricky and beyond the manufacturing capability of a lot of Pegasus societies, so it was instead a slightly brownish gray. The disadvantage was definitely that it showed blood. 

He went back to his quarters so exhausted that the world was shaking unsteadily. He showered as best he could with one arm held up out of the spray, dried off, went back into his room, and found Rodney there waiting for him, wrapped in his eye-searing orange Antarctica fleece. It was getting a lot of wear, lately, and John kind of liked seeing it. 

“Hey,” McKay said. 

John didn’t answer, preoccupied with a coughing fit. When he finally finished, dropping down to sit on the foot of his bed in exhaustion, McKay was frowning. “You went offworld and you’re still that bad?” he asked. 

“Healthiest of the team leaders we have left,” John said. It was midmorning now, and he probably should just stay up, but he absolutely could not face the day like this. He coughed again, for a solid minute. “Christ,” he said, and went to spit in his trash basket. “Ugh.”

“You’re worse off than me,” Rodney said mildly. 

John thought he really should react to that, but it was beyond him, so he flopped over and lay on the bed, trying not to wheeze too obviously. “I’m so fucking tired,” he said, pathetic.

As he’d sort of hoped he would, McKay came over and sat on the bed beside him, putting a warm hand soothingly on his shoulder. John coughed a little more, burying his face in Rodney’s hip and letting the spasms rack his body. “You’re okay,” Rodney said softly, reassuring. 

“Thanks for being nice,” John said, aware he was kind of being a princess. Rodney petted him a little bit, soothing and warm. “I bled on my damn shirt,” John went on in a moment. 

“The new one?” Rodney asked. “Damn it.”

“Everything I own is either bloodstained, ripped, or both,” John said plaintively. “I can’t even keep up.”

“Sorry, Major,” Rodney said. 

“Tired,” John finished, with a final pout. He shivered, but he was too pathetic in that moment to be able to get himself under the covers. 

“I got you,” Rodney said. He stood up, pulled the covers out from under John, and climbed into the bed with him. John sighed, snuggling back into the orange fleece. “I was up all night, too,” Rodney added in a moment. 

“Then it’s time for sleep,” John said. 

“Yes,” Rodney said. “Let’s do that.” 

There was no way anything so neon should have been restful, but John indulged himself and snuggled into the warm, solid, Rodney-smelling embrace of the orange fleece and drifted off. 


End file.
